Interactive Week has an item on “an enhancement to the basic language of the Internet” called Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN)> Essentially, ECN adds a tiny bit of information to a packet header for e-mail and Web requests to reduce the number of packets lost during transmission. The Internet Engineering Task Force is close to making ECN a proposed official standard, and Cisco expects to make the new technology available in its routers by early 2002.

From an Interactive Week story on the U.S. patent issuing process: “As the technological ferment in the U.S. grew wildly effervescent at
the end of the 1990s, the number of patent applications relating to the
networked world exploded. But the USPTO didn’t have the staff or
budget to meet the challenge. As a result, experts say, patents that
shouldn’t have been granted were given USPTO approval, and patents
that should have sailed through spent too much time lingering on the
desks of overworked examiners.”

Interactive Week follows up on the controversy surrounding last week’s release of a Gartner study showing that Linux server sales were just 8.6 percent of the market, comapred with the 27 percent figure reported by IDC: “The dispute over the Gartner and IDC figures mirrors a debate within
IDC itself, between its hardware and software analysts. Operating
system analyst Dan Kusnetzky saw 27 percent market share for Linux
at a time when IDC was reporting growth was stagnant for Windows
NT.”

eWEEK reviews Red Hat’s Tux 2.0 Web server: “Running on a Linux 2.4 kernel [Tux] has taken performance far beyond what was previously possible and blazes the way for future Web servers built on the same architecture.”

Portable OpenSSH 2.9.p2 is now available for your downloading pleasure. From the Portable OpenSSH home page: “Normal OpenSSH development produces a very small, secure, and easy to maintain version for the OpenBSD project. The OpenSSH Portability Team takes that
pure version and adds portability code so that OpenSSH can run on many other operating systems.”

ATLANTA, GA June 18, 2001 – ActiveState, a leader in open source programming tools,
today at Microsoft Tech Ed 2001, announced the first
release of Visual Perl, Visual Python and Visual XSLT for Beta 2 of Microsoft Visual
Studio.NET. These solutions allow developers to edit,
debug and run programs written in Perl, Python and XSLT in the Visual Studio.NET IDE.
“Our participation in the Visual Studio Integration Program enables us
to bring the advanced editing and testing environment of Visual Studio
.NET to our customers,? said Dick Hardt, Founder & CEO, ActiveState. ?A
chief benefit of this integration for customers is in productivity
advances. For example, moving from a text editor to a visual
environment in programming is akin to the advances of moving from
Notepad to Word in word processing.?

Features:

• Editor – code completion, syntax-based colorizing, syntax error
  detection, language-aware auto-indenting, code folding, and keyword tips
• Integrated online help – connect to ASPN and search and retrieve
  online resources
• Graphical debugger – manage breakpoints, control flow, view
  variables, lists, and complex objects, and for Perl debug remote
  processes
• Project manager – manage groups or related files, data files,
  and for XSLT remote URL handling

Visual Perl also includes ActiveState?s unique regular expression
debugger, which enables programmers to easily step through Perl regular
expressions one step at a time. The debugger helps determine where and
why regular expression matches fail and provides a user interface with
easy to understand descriptions for generating regular expression
syntax.

Visual XSLT also contains ActiveState?s one-of-a-kind XSLT debugger,
which synchronizes input and code while debugging in real time. It also
displays XSLT variables and parameters and allows programmers to enter
arbitrary Xpath expressions in the debugger Watch window while
debugging.

?It?s great to have full development support for Perl within Visual
Studio. Visual Perl?s features such as the colorized editor and code
completion have helped me develop code more quickly,? said Visual Perl
beta tester Chuck Wagner, Software Developer, Data Stable Consulting.
?I?m particularly looking forward to trying out the new regular
expression debugger — so that I can step through a regular expression
while it is being matched — it?s a process that until now I?ve found
frustrating to say the least.?

?It?s been exciting working with ActiveState on bringing these open
source programming languages to Visual Studio.NET,? said Tom Button,
vice president of Developer Tools at Microsoft Corp. ?This really fits
our mission of enabling developers to rapidly create Web applications
using their language of choice.?

?We?ve received tremendous feedback from beta-testers, who?ve found the
advanced editing and debugging features in Visual Studio.NET in
combination with Perl, Python and XSLT to be a powerful tool. In
particular, they like being able to interactively test the trickier
parts of programs with the Regex and XPath debuggers, before running the
entire program. This has resulted in significant productivity gains,?
said Eric Promislow, Visual Project Lead, ActiveState.

Visual Perl is available with ASPN Perl at $495. The download is accessible at
http://ASPN.ActiveState.com/ASPN/Perl. Visual Python and
Visual XSLT are currently available in beta and can be freely downloaded
from www.ActiveState.com/ASPN.

About ActiveState:
ActiveState is the leading provider of open source based programming
products and services for cross-platform development. ActiveState’s key
technologies are Perl, the Internet’s most popular programming language;
Python and Tcl, user-friendly scripting languages; PHP, the dynamic Web
programming language; and XSLT, the XML transformation language. The
ActiveState Programmer Network (ASPN) offers these technologies with the
latest information and productivity tools, empowering programmers with
the freedom to work with their preferred language and development
environment.

Media/Analyst Contact:
Lori Pike
Director Corporate Communications,
ActiveState
phone 604.484.6417 / cell 604.808.6655

© ActiveState Corporation 2001.

ActiveState, ASPN, Visual Perl, Visual Python and Visual XSLT are
trademarks of ActiveState Corp. All other company names herein may be
trademarks of their respective owners.

GGZ Gaming Zone, an alternative to Microsoft’s online gaming product, now supports KDE with its 0.0.4 release. A few KDE games and frontends are available, with many more planned for future release. Check out KDE Dot News for more information on GGZ’s spiffy new KDE support.

Distributed denial of service attacks, report eWEEK, “are likely to get much worse” in the future. The reason: Attackers are refining their skills to create more complex assaults on remote systems that are “designed to elude even the best defenses.” The article states that the upcoming release of Microsoft’s Windows XP operating system “provides attackers with a made-to-order launching pad for their DDoS assults” because it will support “raw sockets,” allowing users to spoof IP addresses.

A buffer overflow in version 1.4 of GazTek HTTP Daemon may allow a remote user to execute code on that system with ‘nobody’ user privileges. The post on Help Net Security notes the author has been contacted regarding the bug, but has not yet responded.

Help Net Security posts two items for Debian users. Version 2.6.2 of VT102 terminal emulator rxvt have a bugger overflow in the tt_printf() function (details). In xinetd, there is a possible overflow in the logging code that could be triggered when using a fake identd (details).